readings adopted into the Beijing dialect: Examples of colloquial readings adopted into the Beijing dialect: Sichuanese In Sichuanese, colloquial readings tend to resemble Ba-Shu Chinese (Middle Sichuanese) or Southern Proto-Mandarin in Ming Dynasty, while literary readings tend to resemble modern standard Mandarin. For example, in the Yaoling Dialect the colloquial reading of "" (meaning "things") is [], which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in Song Dynasty (960 - 1279). Meanwhile, its literary reading, [], is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation []. The table below shows some Chinese characters with both literary and colloquial readings in Sichuanese. Wu In the northern Wu-speaking region, the main sources of literary readings are the Beijing and Nanjing dialects during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and Modern Standard Chinese. In the southern Wu-speaking region, literary readings tend to be adopted from the Hangzhou dialect. Colloquial readings tend to reflect an older sound system. Not all Wu dialects behave the same way. Some have more instances of discrepancies between literary and colloquial readings than others. For example, the character had a initial in Middle Chinese, and in literary readings, there is a null initial. In colloquial readings it is pronounced in Songjiang. About 100 years ago, it was pronounced in Suzhou and Shanghai, and now it is . Some pairs of literary and colloquial readings are interchangeable in all cases, such as in the words and . Some must be read in one particular reading. For example, must be read using the literary reading, , and must be read using the colloquial reading, . Some differences in reading for the same characters have different meanings, such as , using the colloquial reading means "make great effort," and using the literary reading means "get a desired outcome." Some colloquial readings are almost never used, such as for and for . Examples: Min Nan Min languages, such as Taiwanese Hokkien, separate reading pronunciations () from spoken pronunciations () and explications (). Hokkien dictionaries in Taiwan often differentiate between such character readings with prefixes for literary readings and colloquial readings ( and , respectively). The following examples in Pe̍h-oē-jī show differences in character readings in Taiwanese Hokkien: In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words. For example, the Hokkien word bah ("meat") is often written with the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings